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The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software is Unsustainable
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this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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People who are motivated by money have been saying this for decades. And they’re still wrong because not everyone is motivated by money.
I kinda agree but you still need money to live and if I was able to work on open source projects while sustaining myself I would choose it anytime.
There are plenty of people who get paid to write open source software. The internet simply wouldn’t exist without OSS:
And that’s just scratching the surface.
Right, there's plenty of people also not getting paid anything for their work. This "You shouldn't care about money" feels like a straw man argument to OP's argument which I think could also be said as "OSS isn't sustainable unless everyone is paid a sustainable amount".
It's just all around frustrating. It has that same energy as "You criticize the system yet you're a part of it" example. For example, I wont be able to show this thread to my landlord when rent is due saying, "You shouldn't care about money, I'm an OSS dev so I dont"
So in closing, I guess I wish everyone had a UBI to be sustainable and then yeah OSS itself could be sustainable as a hobby project.
Never said devs shouldn’t care about money. If you aren’t having fun maintaining some code, stop. If it is commercially interesting, you will probably be contacted. Charge for bug bounties. Prioritize features based on compensation. Start a foundation. There are lots of business models for OSS, the author of this article talks about how this problem is already solved - just not for him.
OSS itself is not a business model. OSS is provably sustainable. Dude just wants it handed to him.
I never said someone shouldn’t care about money. That was never my argument.
My argument was that people who DO care about money have been claiming it’s going to usher in the demise of OSS and yet it thrives.
How many working people are doing it not because of the money but solely because they enjoy the work?
You’d be surprised
I can think of at least twenty that I know or knew personally.
I seriously doubt it.
I work for money. While I enjoy my work. I wouldn’t do it for free. I have to eat, pay a mortgage, etc.
Hell even if I wont the lottery. I wouldn’t do this job for free and it’s a really good job.
I would (and do) work on my own projects for free.
You can do that now. Nothing stops you from doing free work. Most people can’t afford to work for free.
I think there should be a clause in most open source projects that you’ll donate time if used for corporate interest. That way companies would be forced to contribute which means the employee is paid.
I’ve seen many companies just take from oss. They need to give back as well.
How many hours per week do you spend working on your own project for free?
How many bug reports and merge requests do you get per day?
I promise you that the way you work on your own project does not scale to the level of big FOSS projects with tens or hundreds of thousands of users or more.
I dare to say 0.01%. Most devs, including open source devs are payed one way or another.
Sure, there are labours of love. But most aren't.
Sounds like you don't know the story of core-js. Any popular open-source is basically unsustainable without profit.
https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md